


Sinister Kid

by bluesyturtle



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cold Weather, Eventual Relationships, F/M, First Time, Food Porn, Heterosexual Sex, M/M, Manipulation, Multi, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pre-Slash, Resolved Sexual Tension, Snowed In, Threesome - F/M/M, Timeline What Timeline, Unhealthy Relationships, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 00:42:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bedelia gets more than she bargained for when a snowstorm changes the nature of her and Hannibal's relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sinister Kid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Randstad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/gifts).



> _A sinister kid is a kid who runs to meet his Maker/A drop dead sprint from the day he's born/Straight into his Maker's arms/And that's me, that's me/The boy with the broken halo/That's me, that's me/The devil won't let me be_
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> However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears. Because when you are sharing your body and heart with a great woman the world fades away.  
> \--Woody Allen

Hannibal eyes the falling snow warily through the floor-to-ceiling window as their session begins. At first he watches because of the cold, white glow the ice casts on everything in Bedelia’s sitting room. As she asks more complicated questions about this, that, or the other, he watches out of concern.

He waits for her to finish speaking before he brings her attention to the potential snowstorm raging outside.

“Perhaps it would be better if we were to reschedule.”

She spares a glance out the window, exposing the long expanse of her neck as she turns. A single curled lock of blonde hair tumbles over her collar bone. He brings his eyes back to her face as she swivels about to face forward once more.

“There hasn’t been a problematic snowstorm here years. Either way, I wouldn’t have you drive in it.”

Her concern for his safety is every bit as authentic as his concern that they will be snowed in by the end of their hour together, but he concedes, reasoning that it is probably polite to do so.

This congenial acquiescence, of course, gets them snowed in.

He still manages to look embarrassed when the amount of snowfall doubles from what it was just that morning and leaves them barricaded inside the house. The flurries falling angrily onto the white-blanketed ground have only grown more aggressive in their descent by the time their session comes to a close. Outside the wind howls and the trees in the yard thrash at the force of it.

She flips on the television in the next room and they watch in muted horror as every news anchor advises against being outside for the next few hours. There is a mention of possible power outages and other such atrocious inconveniences until she gently presses the power button and sends the room into a frenetic state of silent disquiet.

Barely concealing her slowly building wave of discomfort, she invites him to stay until the roads have been cleared. Hannibal is overtly gracious in his acceptance; she attributes that mainly to their absence of any kind of alternative.

They stand there awkwardly for a full minute, maybe more. Bedelia taps the pads of her fingers soundlessly on the doorframe. Hannibal presses his hand down over the front of his jacket, hands steady but endearingly restless, agitated. She takes pity on him and leads him into the kitchen for a drink since he won’t be driving anytime soon and her nerves are just about as on edge as his appear to be.

She polishes off a full glass of Cabernet Sauvignon in the time it takes for him to drain half his glass. He tracks the unhurried depletion of her second glass and catches up with alarming finesse.

The snow continues to fall outside.

After about half an hour more of stilted, unyielding conversation, he asks if he she might allow him to fix dinner while they wait on the weather to change. She considers the current contents of her kitchen and informs him of the duck in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. It had been purchased that morning from the market hours before her session with Hannibal. The snow had been much more temperate then but had already begun to stick from the night before.

She knows Hannibal is famed for his culinary expertise but has never experienced it firsthand. There had never been an appropriate time or place to partake.

“How long has it been refrigerated?”

She dutifully tells him less than a day, and he sets about removing it from the aforementioned bottom drawer while she aimlessly swirls the deep red wine in her glass. He already has a plan for the duck, apparently, because he begins rooting through the cabinets for foil, bowls, and a pan. When he inquires as to the location of an instant read thermometer, she points him toward the drawer to the left of the sink.

At one point during his ceaseless bustling, she attempts to offer her hands for the cause, but he politely refuses. He insists that she leave the matter of the food with him. All he really demands of her in return, however subtly, is that she engages him in idle chatter whilst he works.

Well, she initially misinterprets their discourse as idle. As the spicy hints of ginger and tamarind wafting through the kitchen bloom and intensify, she begins to decipher a pattern from his queries.

He asks loaded questions and doesn’t look at her until he’s finished speaking. His hands are always full when he speaks, giving him a reason to avoid her eyes and to keep his whole attention concentrated on the task of dinner changing and becoming in his hands. She would believe he weren’t invested in her answers if she couldn’t tell that the actions were automatic, that he could conceive of whatever meal he chose to create and compose it by rote.

There’s no way to tell whether he knows how much he gives away in doing this, but she feels as though he must. Nothing comes of answering his questions but for more questions, deceptively simple and mundane.

From the assorted odds and ends of her kitchen Hannibal assembles a dinner of Balinese Roast Duck. With unforced modesty he confesses it isn’t _exactly_ Bebek Betutu, as per the recipe he uses at home when he prepares the dish for his own dinner table. He says he improvised and substituted many of the ingredients the dish called for if she didn’t have presently them.

They jointly set the table. Bedelia gives Hannibal an assessing look when he requests candles to eat by, and he merely reminds her of the possibility that the lights may go out. She makes a brief detour into the den to light the fireplace in the event that a power surge does happen and leaves them without heat or light. When she returns to the dinner table Hannibal has lit two candles and pulled out her chair for her.

The fire turns out to be the right move as it warms the house considerably just halfway through their meal. By the time the lights flicker the first time, just seconds before the electricity shorts from the entire house, they have moved onto dessert. It is Mousse au Citron with the perfect amount of shredded lemon zest garnishing its smooth, whipped face.

The fireplace roars in the adjacent room. They sit, for the first time, in comfortable silence with their small bowls of sugary, zesty cream on the table before them. Their shadows bob up on the wall, phantoms of the possibility, the potential, lying wait within their inaction. There’s urgency, and there’s calm. Bedelia keeps her eyes fixed on the dwindling sweet cream in her bowl. They have drinks by the fire after because it’s good to be warm inside as well as out if it’s as cold as it is outside and nothing is happening to make it any better.

She doesn’t say that to Hannibal, but she supposes she doesn’t have to. He wears a blank, mildly conflicted look on his face like he doesn’t want to risk impropriety but fears the impropriety lies only in his wish not to cross any lines.

The lights don’t come on, even after she directs him to a bedroom upstairs.

He doesn’t sleep, and neither does she.

Being near him, maybe, makes her restless. She can only think of Miggs struggling on the ground while Hannibal snips the webbed lingual frenulum beneath his tongue and then forces the mangled meat down his throat. The memory has her trapped in the past when Hannibal wanders back downstairs at around two in the morning.

He makes two cups of Baihao Yinzhen tea and sits with her by the fire. The snow falls outside, and the fire pops and casts more shadows on the wall behind them.

She thinks she dreams about falling into the snow outside and slowly freezing through to her core as it continues to bury her, endless and biting and terrifying. Somewhere in that dream there are hands; they could be pushing her down or pulling her up, but the icy tomb doesn’t free her or swallow up more of her. It simply crystallizes around the snuffed shell of her body.

The snow, the lack of sensation encases her completely, and she shivers; a soft sound of objection rumbles in her throat and through her chest. Her eyes fall open, but she isn’t awake. She isn’t trapped in the snow either. Vaguely, she can see the last embers dying out in the fireplace. Faintly, she can feel the soft weight of a blanket lifting off from her shaking shoulders.

Someone whispers to her, “Are you awake?”

She tries to say _no_ , but the word won’t form, and she figures that’s better than an actual answer anyway.

Hannibal, she remembers him as his hands come up under her arms, hoists her up out of the armchair easily. To this she tries harder to protest, but her words still sound too slurred together to be coherent. He carries her up the stairs like a man would carry his bride though the threshold of their honeymoon suite, and she isn’t embarrassed about the comparison so much as she is indignant to be _carried_ by anyone in her own home.

Bereft of adequate speech ability, she whacks his chest with the back of her hand and hums in response to his answering laugh. She does not turn her face into the pressed fabric of his dress shirt, though she does notice, foggily, that he must not have even lied down. Otherwise there would be at least a few wrinkles down the front of it. She presses her hand there again, uncertainly, cataloguing the loss of his jacket and tie. He sets her down on her bed so that she can sit first and lie down unassisted.

She wonders about impropriety and blinks at him, vision clearing and head finally settling. Strange that she doesn’t recall consuming quite enough alcohol to warrant a headache or to feel groggy with drink.

“The tea,” she remarks languidly. His expression doesn’t flicker. He doesn’t look away. “Melatonin?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head and mumbles, “We’re going to talk about this when I wake up, Hannibal.”

“The tablets were in the cupboard right by the coffee mugs. It seemed appropriate.”

If anything else slips out of her mouth she doesn’t hear or register it. She lies back and the blanket tucks in underneath her chin, and Hannibal is gone the next time she blinks and closes her eyes.

When she wakes later in the morning the roads are much improved, though there is still an impressive amount of snow outside. Hannibal’s car is gone from the driveway, which figures, but she finds a note from him on the counter underneath the plastic container of melatonin he confessed to administering several hours previous.

_The lights came back on while you were sleeping. I suspect we will have much to talk about during our next session. Thank you for allowing me to wait out the storm here. It was very gracious of you, and I only hope I did not abuse your hospitality by implementing these tablets to get you to sleep._

_I thought perhaps my presence made you nervous and realize now my actions may have only increased that likelihood. I only wished that you would be comfortable in your own home._

_There is breakfast for you on the stove. Depending on when you wake, it may still be warm._

_—H._

She stares at the note and then at the covered pan on the stove. The coddled eggs with chanterelles are, in fact, warm. Irritated with the morning and hungry for food, she serves herself and wonders how long ago Hannibal left. She feels robbed of a perfect opportunity to scold him for lacing her tea with melatonin and moreover, feels frustrated with herself, unfairly, for not thinking to question the drink at all when he slid it into her hands. If she had asked what it was, she thinks he would have had no reservations about telling her. He probably would have been honest about the melatonin.

Perhaps it was because he’d saved her life before that it felt a little foolish to be so cross about unwitting consumption of a sleep supplement. Her eyelids had been heavy anyway. It wasn’t as if it would have killed her.

If it had been someone else she might have been more apprehensive, but Hannibal wouldn’t have harmed her in her beleaguered state. She has a defined enough concept of him to know that misconduct of _that_ sort would have been intolerably rude to his sensitivities.

She eats about a quarter of her plate when the front door opens and her back straightens. There’s a steak knife in her hand and a cordless phone in the other the moment she hears shoes tapping on the wooden floorboards.

Hannibal freezes when he walks into the kitchen, surreptitiously clocks the knife in her hand and the phone in the other, and gives her a questioning glance. She sets the knife down and then the phone, shrugs a little in the way of explaining herself, and then sits back down, unembarrassed. There is a carton of orange juice in one of his hands. He shifts for a moment, unsure as to whether his company will be welcome now.

“You’ve made enough for two,” she says softly, digging back into her plate.

“That was not by design.”

“It would hardly be the most outrageous thing to happen to either of us if you sat down and had breakfast.”

“No, I suppose not.”

She looks at him, his eyes on the note folded in half resting beside her plate. It occurs to her as he moves around in the kitchen behind her that she had wielded a knife against him just a few minutes ago and that he didn’t seem even minutely disturbed.

He sits as she stands to tuck the knife back into the woodblock by the sink. His eyes are on his plate when she comes back to the counter where their plates and two glasses of orange juice sit.

 _Well,_ she supposes dryly, _some actions become automatic over time with increased exposure._

\--

During their next session they don’t speak about melatonin or power outages or snow. Hannibal mostly tells her all about Will Graham and how unlike any other person the man is. Bedelia listens, bemused at the man’s absolute lack of professional distance from his official, unofficial patient. He goes on about empathy and mirror neurons, and there’s a brief detour about a living, human body growing fungi straight out of well-nourished soil and decomposing flesh.

Hannibal is a little blindsided when she directs the questions back at him, but he covers for himself with all the ease of a seasoned pretender. He smiles politely every now and again, and her mind supplies her with unbidden flashes into the past.

She swallows around conjured images of a strong pair of hands squeezing around her throat and of books crashing to the ground at the force of her shoulder impacting the shelf holding them. A repressed shudder shivers just underneath the surface of her skin and creeps down her spine. She remembers, so perfectly, the sound of steel scissors detaching skin from skin.

“Dr. Du Maurier?”

It feels ridiculous that he would call her that after he killed a man for her; after he spent the night in her home; after he tucked her into bed. It feels ridiculous that this room exists solely for him and that he deigns to use it now for another person completely separate from himself.

“Yes, Hannibal.”

“I believe we are out of time.”

 _Son of a bitch stole my line,_ she thinks to herself irately.

“It would seem so.”

And it goes on like this for months. Her days alternate between learning new recipes to introduce into her kitchen, penning and revising drafts to be sent in later for publication in academic journals, and listening to Hannibal find new ways to unpack his fascination toward Will Graham. Her guard comes down over the course of these sessions, and seeming to be wholly aware of the exact moment when she will be least suspecting of any misdeeds on his part, he invites her for dinner, at his home this time.

She accepts the offer unthinkingly, doubting they will have a repeat of last time and doubting that anything spectacular will happen. He prepares prosciutto alongside roasted quail and only offers her wine throughout the course of the meal, being very careful to announce exactly what is on the label.

It could be penance, but it feels more like an abstruse inside joke than it does remorse.

The food is delicious, as she expected it would be. She feels herself emboldened by the familiarity of the meal and the comfortable atmosphere of Hannibal’s dining room. It may be that whimsical boldness that gives life to the words on her tongue now, the suggestion that she prepare dinner for them one night, perhaps next week or the week after. Gracious as ever, Hannibal nods his head and says yes, that would be lovely.

They go back and forth, French dishes and Italian dishes and Korean and Mediterranean dishes; Sangiovese, Chianti, Riesling, Rosé; lamb, quinoa, salmon, oxtails. She teaches him to make Trifle Belle Hélène one night, and he teaches her the following night to make Tiramisù.

It’s all incredibly inappropriate and she gets very little work done on the articles she had intended to send in for publication within the next few months. For the most part her time consists of adding to recipes, perfecting the ones Hannibal has taught her, and questioning, every once in a while, how in the world she became an apprentice to her one and only patient.

One particular evening after the holidays have passed, she finds herself with heavy cream saturating the tips of three of her fingers and one very focused pair of eyes trained on the offending hand.

He takes to her hand with a clean towel, even though she has her other hand free, dangling at her side. She just watches him twist and knead slightly at the nail beds where the cream would be settling. In a smaller voice than she would like, she says, “I can take care of it, Hannibal.”

“Which is why I would prefer to do it,” he replies easily, still twisting gently at the towel.

If she did need him to do it, there would be no choice but to let him, but she has every choice here. She can let him or she can take her hand away.

The fingers not working at the mess supply gentle pressure to the pulse in her wrist. She takes her hand away finally, not liking that he would be able to tell that her heartbeat was slightly quicker than it should ordinarily be, and washes her hands in the sink.

He doesn’t do anything like that again when they cook together, which has become something that they do, typically on Friday or Saturday evenings. He smiles when she makes Tiramisù just the way he taught her and lavishes the dessert with praises that sound frustratingly genuine to her ears.

It’s so far from appropriate she doesn’t even bother to think of all the ways that it is anymore.

The next time they work with heavy cream, this time for a panna cotta recipe, Hannibal ends up with a smattering of it on the blade of his palm and down the curve of his wrist. It’s uncharacteristic that he would slip, but he’s had a full glass of wine by that point and is in the middle of empathically telling her a story about a French girl he knew as a teenager in Paris. She’s prepared to discount it as a thoughtless accident when she sees him reaching for a towel on the other side of the sink.

He takes it across the heel of his hand deliberately, a wordless question and an offering. Maybe prematurely, she decides, _why not?_ and plucks the towel calmly but decisively from the loose hold of his grip. She dabs at the mound of his palm and works back up, slowly, to the bottom knuckle of his littlest finger.

“Clumsy hands for a doctor,” she whispers, folding the towel and pressing it into his hands.

“Yes,” he murmurs in response, smiling.

She notices more of him after that, and he’s careful to be every bit as receptive as he is symbolic. There are more casual touches that become less casual the more frequently they occur, more soft looks over this Japanese delicacy or that Indian watermelon curry. One night they deliberate over the best course of action to take in preparing the chicken Hannibal bought for the purpose of their dinner when he very blatantly says that the chili peppers for the Szechuan dish he proposes contain capsaicin.

“A natural aphrodisiac,” he explains, though he doesn’t need to.

Bedelia smirks. She isn’t flummoxed in the slightest. She merely tells him to get what he needs and sets about fixing dessert, an Italian gelato recipe she learned from a local in Florence one summer as an undergrad.

The chicken is in the process of marinating when he comes up behind her and experimentally places his chin over her shoulder. She covers the strained Kaffir lime gelato and slides it to the right so he can take it to the refrigerator. They won’t be able to have any until much later in the night or the following day.

Hannibal comes back behind her, and the air he carries with him is different. It’s warm and crowds around her like a blanket for her bones. His lips brush the spot behind her ear and he breathes into her hair, her cheek, her temple.

She leans back into the solid backdrop of his body, head listing back softly, vulnerably. 

He laughs and says, “It’s _very_ inappropriate, yes.”

But words are such paltry things anyway and it doesn’t mean anything to him that the lines have all been crossed. She knows it doesn’t mean anything to her either because when he kisses her, lips pressed softly against hers as a request and not as a demand, she sighs and kisses him back.

_We’re going to talk about this when I wake up._

Paltry, unreliable things, words could be.

A kiss is all that’s shared between them for a long time. Hannibal knows how to draw a beautiful thing out, and Bedelia knows a thing or two about making that as difficult for a man as possible.

She wears flowing, colorful dresses as a means of tempting him and his hands do, as a result, wander more distractedly down the curves of her body. It’s snowing one Saturday when he lifts her easily up onto the counter and inches her legs further apart so he can situate himself in between them. At first she thinks he’ll just touch her the way he has before, sparingly and curiously but with a clinical distance neither of them could ever slink passed. But it’s different this time in that he slips his fingers beneath the thin fabric clinging to her body. He insinuates his hand under the waistband and seeks out the eager swell of her clitoris with just his middle finger and rolls it languidly.

He leans forward and licks lightly at her bottom lip, not standing closely enough for her to take a kiss from him and not accommodating for any such thing until a pulse of warm arousal pools in her belly and coaxes a contented sigh from her lips. When Hannibal bends in to kiss her, her mouth opens to him and her hips ease up and then back, up and then back, pressing his hand harder against her as his finger continues to move so slowly before easing down a ways to saturate in the wet give between her legs, the folds of her vulva warm and inviting to his practiced fingers.

A moan falls out of her mouth, surprised and hungry, as that exploring finger slips effortlessly inside of her. He uses his thumb to stimulate the engorged bud of her clitoris as his finger moves in and out. She shifts about on the counter, uncomfortable and suspended in between pleasure and frustration. Her hands grip at his shirt, at his hair, and at the unforgiving marble beneath her. He withdraws his fingers from her and holds her steady, one hand just above her knee and the other higher up on her thigh, smearing the evidence of his handiwork and her body’s response to it on her skin.

There are no words at the front of her mind except the usual _please, don’t stop, this is so inappropriate, Hannibal, good lord, you’re going to burn the food._

They don’t speak around their ragged breathing. Hannibal looks delightfully rumpled, shirt untucked and hair screwed up on one side where she clutched it too hard and got it to stick up perfectly perpendicular to his fair eyebrows. She releases her iron grip on the back of his shirt and moves her hand to his bicep. The other hand stays perched on the back of his neck, fingernails easing out of the crescent-shaped marks left on his skin.

After a moment more of consideration, he crouches, fights briefly with the skirt of her dress, and pulls her panties to one side before drawing his tongue across the slick, smooth flesh made available to him.

Bedelia’s hand shoots up to hold onto the edge of cupboard beside her head. The other clings still to the nape of his neck before migrating up the back of his head. A groan or something equally horrible and fantastic buzzes relentlessly from his mouth into and through her. Her head presses back into the cabinet behind her and she comes with his tongue pressing deep inside her and his fingers bruising her thighs where he holds onto her to keep her from falling.

When he straightens out to kiss her afterward she lets his tongue touch hers in equal parts gratitude and politeness. For a long moment he stares at the breathless mess of her, flushed to the ears with her dress a bunched up around her waist.

He leans back in, delicately tugging her dress back over her splayed knees and pulling her to sit up straighter, torso and neck curved back in a lazy, reverse slouch. Their shoulders brush as he places his hands on either side of her hips. He grazes her cheek with his lips.

“What a gorgeous spectacle you make.”

It’s during their next visit that Hannibal props her up against the wall in between the foyer and the kitchen and asks, lifting her dress unceremoniously up around her hips, if she _would like to._

She only nods yes and holds onto him while he opens his pants and audibly rips the material of her underwear out of the way to get to her. It alarms her slightly that he doesn’t use a condom, but he feels hot and heavy and slick inside of her when they move, and she can’t will herself to make him stop. He makes a low noise in the back of his throat like something in between a winded pant and an animalistic grunt that gets louder and happens more frequently when she bites him, when she throws her head back and makes noises of her own.

The angle is such that he can keep her secured between his body and the wall even with a hand between them, touching her with his thumb even as hid body smacks and slips into and around hers. A quick, ruthless orgasm lights through her and she holds onto him as he chases after his own. His single cry is muffled in her hair, though she feels it vibrate pleasingly against her scalp and along the outer ridge of her ear.

They have Mousse au Citron for dessert, which Hannibal feeds to her as she lazily sheds her clothes onto the floor of his bedroom.

\--

Hannibal still comes to see her on Wednesday afternoons, though mostly they cook or have sex or he watches her type from over her shoulder. He doesn’t pay her for the hour or hours they spend together. If he ever mentions Will Graham, it is in passing or in reference to a case Jack Crawford dragged either of them along for. She has never met the man and she has a professional opinion about his work with Jack Crawford.

The longer they are in each other’s company, the more of him she begins to see. She sees that he has a particular dislike for Jack Crawford that stems from more than just the man’s treating of Hannibal’s favorite empath. She sees that his interest in Will Graham may not be purely platonic and that it sure as hell is less than professional or scientific. Less clearly, she can see that while Hannibal does not have innocent desires of the man, he doesn’t seek to use him for his natural tendencies and inclinations so much as he simply wants to _observe._

A confounding aspect of Hannibal’s personality is his untamable curiosity. He talks at length about that which interests him, a huge part of his spiel usually directed at the structure of the thing, the person, or the idea, whether it is Will’s Graham’s empathy, the orphaned Abigail Hobbs, or Stephen Hawking’s theory of quantum gravity.

He conceives of ways to take facets of them apart and to rebuild them one healed wound at a time; a man who could be his friend, a girl who could be his daughter, and a universe that could be made not through an infinite number of methods but via one flawed, but infinitely more precious, path.

She asks him one Wednesday evening, after having been fed and undressed and bisected, “Does Will Graham know of your infatuation with him?”

Hannibal doesn’t react to her question, unassuming and innocent as it is. His eyes flick to hers, trace objectively over the swoop of her bare hip, and then down toward the foot of the bed, not searching or even glossing over the surface of what his eyes pass over.

“He has no need of knowing.”

She props herself up on one elbow, eyes fixed aimlessly on the patch of hair in the middle of his chest.

“Why not?”

Melancholically, he says, “One of us would do something rash.”

“You mean,” she teases. Just enough mirth slips into her voice to let him know that he doesn’t have to talk seriously with her about Will Graham if he doesn’t want to. “You would ravish him immediately and he would throw himself at you in a fit of lust, thereby threatening your working relationship?”

With a straight face he intones, “You’re confusing him with yourself.”

“I don’t recall ever throwing myself at you.” She gives him a stern, if only in appearance, look. “You came to me.”

“Even after you retired,” Hannibal adds for good measure.

Lightness creeps back into his tone. Their conversation has eased into banter, exactly the way a conversation between the two of them and of this nature should be had. She matches that lightness and presses her fingers through the gray smattering of chest hair still in her line of vision.

She muses airily, “Which seems to be exactly what Jack Crawford did to Will Graham.”

“Jack Crawford would find the answers to his questions without Will.”

“Even the answer to the riddle of his dead trainee, Hannibal?”

She takes a moment before looking at him, fingers still traversing idly across his skin and through the gray hairs curling around her knuckles. The expression on his face is serene. It is a mask she can’t believe in anymore.

“It’s only a matter of time until he sees you for what you are.”

He wraps an arm around her, fingers nestled definitively against her shoulder blades. Her front presses up into his side when he pulls her in. The touch isn’t threatening, but the unspoken warning is there, present in the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath her palm and alive in the solid beat of his heart.

“Do you see me for what I am, Dr. Du Maurier?”

It is a clinical question, so the use of the title does not bother her. The cold glint flashing in his eyes does not bother her.

“I see enough of you,” she says, the words mouthed more than spoken.

“Yes,” he murmurs critically. His eyes narrow just slightly. “You see enough of me to know.”

There isn’t a second part to that sentence. It is a statement on its own. She sees enough to know, but the fact of knowing would do nothing to save her from him or further cement her value in his eyes.

Seeing him, as an isolated incident, does not change anything.

It changes nothing until a new piece of the puzzle slots into place with the Devon Silvestri murders. The harvesting of human organs and the rising body count coincide with a dinner party Hannibal arranges at his home shortly before the man has been detained.

At first she feels a pang of disgust, a twinge of fear in a deep, primal part of her spine. Hannibal calls her, and she speaks to him as if things still have not changed because they can’t have changed.

He takes her to bed that night, and no, nothing has changed. She hadn’t expected to be capable of believing in such an outrageous lie, but there it is and there they are.

He sits half-dressed before the laptop on her desk and asks why she refused his invitation to attend the feast. There are two tabs open behind the word document containing the first draft of her psychiatric study on the comorbidity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Schizophrenia. One of them is an online database for other peer-reviewed psychiatric journals; the other is TattleCrime.com.

“Uninformed cannibalism is one thing,” she drawls, eyeing the graphics on the blog as he pulls the page up in between paragraph revisions. Her hand comes to rest on the back of the chair. “Really, Hannibal, the audacity.”

Without turning to look at her standing behind him he replies, “You enjoy it when I cook for you.”

“An addict enjoys heroin in his veins.”

“Addiction is a trap of the mind,” he murmurs indifferently.

She says to the laptop screen as the blog switches out for the document, “You would know. You’re prone to them.”

He finally turns to acknowledge her with his eyes. Just a fraction of an emotion betrays the cold set of his features staring emptily back at her.

There’s a strange closed off scrutiny evident in his expression. He agrees with her assessment of him.

“Endicott and Spitzer’s article on affective disorders and Schizophrenia would strengthen the analysis of the data in your fourth paragraph.”

Maybe it unnerves him that it’s true, or maybe he has known as much all along. She doesn’t know which, but he is unabashedly surprised that she has seen it of him all the same.

“Endicott and Spitzer,” she repeats.

He turns back around to make a typed note of it in the margin of the fourth page and alternates once more between glimpses of murder and psychoanalytical text and statistics. She drifts back to the corner of the bed closest to him and watches him work as if from a great distance. She thinks that, really, impropriety never made either of them squeamish anyway.

Bedelia continues dining in his home long enough to convince him that she won’t do anything drastic like run or tell, but in time she makes a calculated withdrawal from his kitchen. He begins to see, before too much time has elapsed, that revelation has ruined the allure of his dinner table.

They continue to cook in her kitchen, and she tells herself it is the same, even though it is clearly a compromise.

He brings wines, seasonings, cutting boards when the occasion demands one her kitchen lacks, and assorted vegetables. She doesn’t tell him not to bring meat, but he doesn’t need her to.

Bedelia leans back against the black granite counter top one such night while Hannibal bustles about her kitchen preparing the clams and black sea bass filets she bought earlier at the market for their dinner that evening. He says nothing of her selections or of their obvious physical characteristics that distinguish them from certain other, more ambiguous cuts of meat.

He is a guest in her home, after all. He will make for her whatever she chooses. It is a small thing to take control of, but it is control all the same. He stands perched over the stove with a cast-iron skillet sizzling before him.

Hannibal is quiet in his concentration, but she knows the moment the focus of his thoughts shifts. She watches his shoulders expand with the short intake of breath that precedes a statement. He says to her, “I am having Will for dinner tomorrow night.”

They have no need of etiquette or secrecy here where no one can hear or see them. She smirks soberly into the lip of her wine glass.

“Has he had an accident?”

He looks at her over his shoulder, one eyebrow arched. She watches him and doesn’t move. Her smirk falters, but she keeps it plastered across her lips, resolutely stubborn in her resolve not to back down or away from him if she can help it.

“I offered to cook for him, and he agreed.”

She only just refrains from rolling her eyes and sets her wine glass down on the counter top behind her.

“Say what you mean to say, Hannibal.”

He doesn’t hesitate or bat an eyelash.

“I would like for you to join us.”

“Would you?” She coos in his direction, easing into the territory of thinly veiled mockery, “And do you think Will Graham would appreciate my company?”

“It would not harm him to meet you.”

“Wouldn’t it?” She walks leisurely toward his post by the stove. He switches off the fire and rotates his body in slight twists of his torso each time she gets that much closer to him. His eyes are challenging when they lock on hers. “Your curiosity harms everyone it touches.”

His jaw clenches once, a conscious tell. The slight pursing of his lips he gives unconsciously.

“And what of your curiosity?”

There is a taunt in the words that really offer nothing in the form of a true question. She eyes him back as directly and unflinchingly as he ever does her. She drops her voice to a whisper, neither confidential nor seductive in the action; the tonal shift is only delicacy, only a turn of intimacy he doesn’t crave or deserve but that he would if he were any other man.

“Maybe the soft animal of my body is a feline.”

Her tone does nothing to the corrosive exterior of him, but her declaration has pierced through and softened his features. That telltale curiosity blossoming across his face will someday kill them both.

He steps closer.

“Felines are resilient.”

The island keeps her pinned in place anyway, but she does not fidget or shrink away from his looming body as he nears. His eyes shine the way they do when a thought has delighted or excited him.

“You’ve lost nearly half of your nine lives by now.”

“And yet I still have more to my name than you do,” she says with a coy tilt of her head.

“It depends on how one defines the possession of life,” he murmurs, touching the very point of her chin just barely with one knuckle. “Most of mine were stolen.”

She swallows, willing her throat not to make a sound as she does.

“It would be difficult for you to kill me.”

His tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip as his hand dips down below her chin, palm in line with her throat. He grazes the sensitive skin there with two fingers, traces down to the dip of the suprasternal notch.

“Funny, I don’t imagine it would be.”

She wraps her fingers around his wrist, a masquerade of quaint flirtation doubling as a threat.

“It would be _foolish_ for you to kill me,” she clarifies, referring to the obvious leaps the police would make and how the evidence would lead straight to him.

She doesn’t say as much, but the obvious, mysteriously pleased edge of steel in his eyes tells her he doesn’t need her to say it. The gravity of this silence projects a shared illusion of control, of power tenuously balanced between them. At the very least, it protects her from the immediate threat of him here in her home with his murderer’s hand poised before the soft flesh of her throat. She fights the breathlessness stealing the volume in her mouth and throat and doesn’t avert her gaze until he looks away first, to the food, as it happens.

He turns at the waist to switch the fire back on, hand lingering on the curve where neck meets shoulder. Her fingers migrate to his knuckles.

“It wouldn’t be difficult for me to kill you either, Hannibal.”

It could be a lie, but it could also be the truth. She doesn’t know, really, what she might be capable of if pushed to react in that context. She wonders if it will come to that, if one of them will kill the other as a means of survival. She wonders how many times he will demand that decision be made even as he takes it away in favor of keeping himself alive. She wonders about Will Graham and Abigail Hobbs, and she wonders about Jack Crawford.

He merely repeats his words, softer, as she comes to stand at his side: “No, I don’t imagine it would be.”

 _Then why has no one killed you yet,_ a voice hisses in the back of her mind.

It’s Miggs’ voice, garbled and choked by blood and by froth.

“Will you join us for dinner tomorrow night?”

She tells him yes.

\--

When she meets Will Graham the following night in Hannibal’s dining room, he stands to greet her but can’t quite hold her eyes for an extended amount of time.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he says, sounding genuine, if flustered.

He extends his hand to her, which Bedelia takes and smiles politely. A slight blush creeps up his neck that she doesn’t believe she imagines, but then, she does possess an idea of him already that summons suppositions as readily as heat summons steam. She watches him shuffle to get his hands in his pockets and thinks about fevers.

To him, she says, “Hannibal’s said so many interesting things about you.”

At this, she shifts her gaze slightly over Will’s tense shoulder to lock eyes with Hannibal. The very edge of his smirking mouth twitches.

Will Graham releases her hand and mumbles, perhaps not meaning to, “You both know so much about me.”

“Only the highlights,” she reassures him.

They sit when Hannibal herds them back toward the table. He pours Chardonnay for Bedelia and Malbec for himself and for Will Graham. There is fragrant Terrine Connaught and pungent robiola cheese on their plates. She knows, because he taught her to know, how much pork goes into a terrine recipe. It smells of clove, salt, and seared fat. Her mouth waters even as her stomach turns.

They eat. Nothing has changed.

Hannibal makes polite conversation with both of them, cueing them in as to the topics that will go over the most smoothly between them. Bedelia learns that Will Graham is something of a mechanic when he wants to be but that his primary occupation, first and foremost, is teaching.

Reflexively, she points out how strange the statement sounds when so much of his time is devoted to his work with Jack Crawford. She phrases it more subtly than that, but she can tell by the red tips of his ears that he doesn’t hear the subtle version but the direct one.

“You work is impressive. I know you’ve closed a number of cases for him,” she redirects.

Hannibal adds, with a nod of his head in Will’s direction, “Will has unparalleled skills in the field.”

Will laughs self-deprecatingly. He mumbles, “Skill is a loose term for what I have.”

Bedelia shoots Hannibal a glance, beginning to suspect what his game is in bringing the three of them into one room together.

“I was going to say clairvoyance, but I thought that might embarrass you,” Bedelia muses, eyes still locked on Hannibal. When she looks back to Will Graham, his eyes are on hers, though they are intentionally unfocused. “I suppose it isn’t any better than empathy, though it doesn’t bear exactly the same connotation.”

“Wait, wait.” Will Graham sits up straighter in his seat and eyes both Bedelia and Hannibal in turn. “This isn’t a…social experiment, is it?”

“No, Will,” Hannibal reassures him smoothly. “I merely wanted the two of you to meet.”

It is actually, legitimately shocking to her how easily Will believes him. He remains slightly unsettled until the end of their meal but relaxes when the dessert comes out. Bedelia’s stomach dips at the sight of the white chocolate panna cotta garnished with orange marmalade. She remembers Hannibal cleaning heavy cream off her fingers and remembers later returning the favor.

Their lies screech to a dead halt in her mind, the collectively ignored noise from a time come and passed.

Everything has changed.

It’s much later, after they’ve dined together several more times that Will Graham begins to feel safe in their combined company. He jokes with them, he brings tasteful wines, and even comes earlier than their agreed upon time to help them in the kitchen once he catches Bedelia doing just that.

She had refrained from that level of conscious participation since Silvestri, since it became clear to her not just who but _what_ the Ripper was. But their dinners had become frequent again with the integration of Will Graham into their routine, and it had grown to be comfortable as it once was. It got to the point where she would smile for no reason, just relieved to have the creative outlet of good food and delicious smells and stolen tastings here and there.

And Will Graham, being who and what he is, sees what is happening as it happens.

He sees Hannibal touch the back of Bedelia’s hand when they make Coeur à la Crème late one evening after dinner. When he leans in close to whisper something into her ear, Will actually flushes tomato red and looks away. A fire twists insistently in her gut; Will touches his jaw nervously, looks anywhere but at them.

Hannibal says, “Qu'est-ce que je ferais sans toi?”

_What would I do without you?_

Try as he might to avoid the increasingly obvious displays between them, Will has a harder time ignoring the occasional brush of hands as instigated by Bedelia. While it all seems to overwhelm him, the blatancies and the subtleties alike, he responds more openly, more pliantly, as Bedelia did, as time presses them along.

Hannibal smiles every time after Will goes home because he sees Will, too, just the way Will can see them. He sees the man’s resolve and his intent; he can see them slipping. He can see, and Bedelia can see, too, that Will Graham is a man who always knows exactly how and when his footing is starting to edge out from under him. Hannibal laughs and shivers later when he finishes inside of her, face hidden in the side of her neck.

The next time Will Graham comes over after that, Bedelia smiles at the man as he follows Hannibal’s instructions to prepare Mousse au Citron. He swallows hard and flushes bright red all the way up his neck to his jawline when she twirls a lock of his dark curly hair around her finger and grazes the shell of his ear with her thumb. She peers up at Hannibal as she does it, and his eyes wrinkle at the corners. This small touch is all she gives him for a long time, and it takes about as long for Will to have a less flabbergasted reaction and to stop glancing disbelievingly in Hannibal’s direction.

After a while, he starts to lean into her touch. After a while, he starts to touch her back.

It rains the night Hannibal finally touches Will Graham for himself. Bedelia’s lips are on Will’s, the taste of apricots and pineapple sage lingering in her mouth and a more brown sugar flavor clinging to his from the Tarte aux Figues. Hannibal’s lips, meanwhile, close around Will’s earlobe. There are hands in Bedelia’s hair, Will’s hands. He tugs her in closer, and she can feel rather than see Hannibal’s hand covering the front of his trousers.

A desperate noise tumbles out of his mouth and crashes into her lips. He tries to draw her in nearer at the same time that he backs more closely into Hannibal. Will turns his head when Hannibal nips at his jaw and takes the gentle, unhurried kiss Hannibal gives to him.

Bedelia runs her hands up Will’s chest and leaves long licks and open mouthed kisses all along his exposed neck as they kiss and moan softly into each other’s mouths. She hears a soft wet noise when they part and straightens out to look from Hannibal to the breathless man trapped in between them and then back.

Will Graham’s eyes are closed, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. His hands are divided between Bedelia’s scalp and Hannibal’s arm. Hannibal smiles wickedly and leaves a feather light kiss on the side of Will’s neck.

He gives her this same look over Will’s bare, glistening shoulder as he drives into him from behind and Will muffles his exalted cries in the pillow beneath her head. She tightens her legs around his waist and urges him to keep moving. Her fingers tug ruthlessly at his hair and pleasure coils tightly in the pit of her stomach. Hannibal presses his chest to Will’s and holds onto the headboard, pumping himself into Will harder and faster and making the latter’s arms shake.

Hannibal typically doesn’t make much noise in bed, but he’s clearly enjoying himself, drinking in the sight of the two of them, Will and Bedelia, splayed before him. His chest and the dip beneath his throat are shiny with sweat.

Bedelia takes Will’s weight as Hannibal shifts farther back to lessen the load and guides his hand in between their bodies so he can touch her as he struggles to match Hannibal’s bruising pace. His fingers fumble at first but then claim dexterity the more rhythmically Hannibal moves behind him. Bedelia nods once, gasping, to communicate to Hannibal that the current speed is the one they want.

Of the three of them, Bedelia estimates that Will, as a result of the doubled stimulation to his body, will hit orgasm first, but Hannibal has other ideas. As the man’s body starts to tremble more noticeably, Hannibal touches Bedelia’s thigh, an unspoken command to release him. Will groans and arches back, eyes pinched shut in exasperated pleasure. Hannibal’s hand has closed around the base of his cock.

He turns to take a teeth-knocking kiss from Hannibal’s lips before muttering a strangled plea and squeezing at Bedelia’s hip. She watches him come back from the brink and back into himself, his chest rising and falling under the sheen of perspiration and lips parted around short, quickened breaths.

When Will is no longer in danger of losing himself, Hannibal drags him further down the bed by his hips so that his face lines up with Bedelia’s navel. He looks blearily up the length of her body. A weak groan buzzes in his throat. His hands slide around her thighs and he bends down a ways so he can lick the wet divide between them. He presses his tongue deep inside the way Hannibal does when he performs this particular sex act for her.

He stays there licking and sucking until his breathing becomes ragged and labored anew. His forehead drops down into the curve above her hip and his shoulders bunch up and hew his spine into an attractive forward hunch. His lips brush her skin and puff soft, warm exhales against her skin in time with Hannibal’s prolonged assault on the lower half of his body. He eases his fingers inside of her and pumps them in and out. His head dips down again to rub at her clitoris with his tongue.

She threads her fingers through his sweaty hair, head falling back and the heat at the center of her body itching and flaring out the closer she gets. One of Will’s hands creeps up over her ribs, and she crushes his fingers as orgasm pulls her under its thrall. Far away she hears Hannibal growling and Will whimpering. She opens her eyes to see him upright on his knees with Hannibal behind him, touching him as he rocks into him slowly but deeply.

Bedelia watches them with one hand resting supine beside her head and the other curled up over her ribs. She watches Will’s nostrils flare and she watches him bite his lip as he comes frantically undone. Hannibal took the condom off of Will’s cock before he wrapped his fingers around him, and it strains to speckle Will’s chest and the protruding bone of one clavicle in pale white semen as he keens and wrenches his eyes shut.

Will’s eyelids relax but remain closed. His head tilts into Hannibal’s, which causes the hair at their temples to brush intimately. Hannibal sighs and bites Will’s shoulder through the shudder that rocks his body in the aftermath of his orgasm. Hannibal’s eyes are trained on Bedelia even as he shivers from a rush of his own coursing through his body.

When Will’s eyes fall open, he watches her, too, listlessly. Hannibal eases out of him gently, leaving wet kisses up the side of his neck and around the protuberance of his Adam’s apple.

He lowers down to his hands and knees and then his elbows before rolling over exhaustedly onto his back. Hannibal follows down, leaning in to flick his tongue languorously at one of her pebbled nipples before moving up higher to lightly kiss her throat, her chin, and finally her lips.

Once there he murmurs, “Qu'est-ce que je ferais sans toi?”

Will, with his eyes closed and his hands at rest by his side, mumbles, “Plus le coeur grandit, moins les paroles sont utiles.”

_As love grows, words become useless._

Bedelia would tell him she agrees, but he is asleep as soon as the words leave his red, swollen lips. Hannibal turns to kiss him once and then lies flat in between them, one hand in Will’s hair and one manacled loosely around Bedelia’s wrist.

Her voice is soft when she says, “You will always need words, Hannibal.”

He doesn’t say anything. He continues brushing the underside of her wrist with his thumb and closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics from The Black Keys
> 
> From Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
> 
> Marcassin Marcassin Vineyard Chardonnay 2008  
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Marcassin-Marcassin-Vineyard-Chardonnay-2008/wine/123530/detail.aspx
> 
> Achaval-Ferrer Finca Mirador Malbec 2006  
> http://www.wine.com/V6/Achaval-Ferrer-Finca-Mirador-Malbec-2006/wine/96589/detail.aspx
> 
> All recipes from Saveur: Authentic Recipes, Foods Drinks and Travels
> 
> French Proverbs  
> http://www.elearningfrench.com/french-love-proverbs.html


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